The first listing of AMD's second 28nm graphics card just went live

Jan 26, 2012 07:44 GMT  ·  By

The first of many Radeon HD 7950 listings to arrive has just gone live today, as Provantage has added the Gigabyte version of the AMD graphics card to its website with pricing being set at $481, or about 367 EUR.

The video card has the product code GV-R795WF3-3GD which seems to imply this is actually a WindForce model, so it comes with a custom cooling system developed in-house by Gigabyte.

As far as pricing is concerned this is slightly higher than the $400-$450 (305 to 343 EUR) suggested by some previous rumors, but, as TechPowerUp suggests, this is normal for such early listings.

AMD’s Radeon HD 7950 is based on the same Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture and Tahiti GPU like that used for the HD 7970, but this comes with four of the core’s Compute Units disabled to turn it into the Tahiti Pro.

The result is a graphics card that includes a total of 1792 stream processors (vs. 2048 in the HD 7970), 112 texture units, 32 ROP units and the same 384-bit wide bus of its elder brother.

The amount of memory installed also wasn’t modified, so we are talking about the same 3GB of GDDR5 video buffer that has an operating speed of 1.25GHz (5GHz data rate), while the Tahiti Pro GPU is clocked at 800MHz.

AMD’s add-in board partners are however allowed to overclock the graphics core to their liking, and by the look of it quite a few 900MHz clocked Radeon HD 7950’s will make it into retail.

Other AMD Radeon HD 7950 features include support for one DVI, one HDMI and two mini-DisplayPort video outputs as well as PCI Express 3.0 and DirectX 11.1 compatibility.

The AMD graphics card is expected to be introduced on January 31 and, unlike the HD 7970 release, this is expected to be a hard launch with availability from day one.